Reflective Synthesis – iPad Integration
With my eighth year of teaching approaching, I am now more excited than ever on how I am going to use the iPad in my classroom. This class has given me the tools necessary to integrate the iPad into my 10th grade U.S. Contemporary History class, to enhance student engagement, motivation, and learning while emphasizing 21st century learning skills.
As we have looked at 21st century skills and how important they are to teaching and learning in today's classroom. One of the areas that I am going to integrate the iPad and enhance how I have already used it is through communication with my students. Through the use of Twitter, assignments and reminders will be sent out daily to my students this school year. Also through it students will be able to instantly, through the use of their mobile device, ask me or their entire class questions that they have or share a great website or resource they have found. Socrative will give me and my students instant feedback, in the form of a short and simple formative assignments, at the beginning or end of class as to where they are at with the material. Also through the use of Educreations I plan on creating mini-lessons for students who missed class or who have questions about a certain topic in my class. These will be posted to our online class website through Schoology, and the link to them will also be sent out via Twitter. I want to use these two items to enhance communication, and foster learning well into the night hours.
I also will have at the beginning of the school year a day where we go through each one of the apps that we will be using in class to give the students a brief tutorial on how to use them. I also plan on having a weekly segment (5-10 min) where students will be able to share with me weekly something new that they have found on the iPad; maybe a new shortcut, new app, or great website. Just as I am teaching them, I want them to teach me as well what they are learning, what is working well, and what isn't working well. During this time as well I will go over apps that I feel will help them in organizing their school work for my class and their other classes. Such items as Dropbox, Google Drive, Remarks, CloudOn, and Evernote are all apps that we will go over that students can use to organize their work, resources, and bookmarks. I also love how Dropbox is so easy to share work/documents through and will be looking more into that, for I have not found a great way to collect digital work from 160 students.
Another 21st century skill that I need to improve on, through the development and integration of the iPad in my class is through creativity. This is also a great tool in the enhancement of media fluency with our students as well. During this class we have looked at a variety of presentation tools, such as Animoto, Voicethread, Prezi, Simpleminds +, iMovie, and more. I plan on using items focused on in this class such as Prezi and iMovie to foster student creativity and learning in my classroom specifically. Students through these apps will be able to create wonderful visual items, present them to the class, and post them via Twitter, YouTube, and Schoology for the class, and other classes to be able to view later. I plan on having students create a 5-10 minute WWII video early on in their year, as well as a War on Terror short documentary at the end of second semester. I plan on using Prezi as well this school year as a way to change up my lecture styles as I have not strayed away from using PowerPoint much in my first seven years of teaching.
I will also stress this year collaboration with other students in and out of the classroom. This will come in the form of working together on varied activities in class, and at home. It will also come in the form of sharing information and commenting to each other via Twitter, Schoology Discussion Board, and through Blogger. I plan on having students create a blog at the start of the year and through the course of the year they will add varied activities, journal entries, resources, links, and media to their blog. Students will then be given groups or friends that they will be responsible to read each other's work and comment on. It will also be a great way for students who maybe working together who don't know each other very well a way to connect, share, and contact each other. I also think that this fosters ownership in their learning, allows them to customize their blog, and be creative with what they put on it.
At Minnetonka we have been very blessed with our technology, and will be moving in to our third year of the 1:1 iPad program. It has been a very interesting three year and our district has not done a great job in giving us the expectations, training, and guidance as to how to use this technology effectively in the classroom. I feel though that through this class I have a very strategic and organized plan as to how I am going to use the iPad, what apps I will be using, and how I will foster their growth and development with it in each of our units. Focusing on 21st century skills such as creativity, collaboration, and communication I hope to foster a learning environment where students are engaged and motivated to learning U.S. History well beyond the time frame of our 56 minute class.
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